New draft hits home for soldiersOne of the enlistment terms that military recruiters tend to gloss over is the two-year period at the end in which the servicemember is part of the Individual Ready Reserve. IRR is a group of men and women who have completed the active duty portion of their enlistment but are still under an obligation to the government. They don't go to weekend drills. They don't go to annual training. They don't get a paycheck. They're civilians. Ask just abo...

Marine's fate important for region's futureAlthough the story may well have taken a grim turn overnight, it appears now as though a U.S. Marine held captive in Iraq may be set free. That notion stands in stark contrast to the somber mood of just a few days ago when it appeared that Cpl. Wassel Ali Hassoun had likely b een killed by his captors. Web sites claimed that Hassoun had been beheaded, and few disputed the claim. After all, that gruesome form of execution had become standard op...

Wide-eyed patriotismIn the dark days of the Vietnam War, Reader's Digest distributed millions of U.S. flag stickers, which found their way to windshields and front doors from sea to shining sea. For a more recent war, we at The Courier distributed thousands of our own flag posters on newsprint last year. Displaying these posters and decals, like the act of waving a flag on the Fourth of July, are an outward but often temporary representation of the inner patrioti...

Laughing all the way to the bankFans of fast cars and Vin Diesel ought to take a certain delight in Burt Rutan's recent success in sending the first private spacecraft to a height of more than 62 miles above the earth. Movies like "The Fast and the Furious" get their kick from a mix of burning rubber and nitrous oxide. So does Rutan's SpaceShipOne. After being carried to a height of 47,000 feet under the belly of a more conventional jet-propelled airplane, the spacecraft's p...

Schools find alternativesMaking a silk purse out of a sow's ear may be asking a little much of the Arkansas school system, but a decent pair of shoes might just be possible. Fifty-seven of the state's smallest schools will be joining forces today, at least at the administrative level, under a school reform plan approved by the Legislature and judged adequate by the state Supreme Court. The plan does not require any school to close. We have already expressed our concer...

Rule, duty given to IraqIn an inspired tactical decision, the United States has given control of Iraq back to the Iraqi people in the form of an interim government that will run the country until a new government can be elected. This action is an affirmation to the Iraqi people of the American promise that our military presence is temporary, although we will offer help in other forms. The inspiration part comes in beating the promised deadline by two days, thus steal...

Goldilocks growth goalsFinding meaning in population numbers is a tricky business. Trying to use those numbers to plan for the future is even more difficult. During the decade of the 1990s, Pope County's population grew by more than 18 percent. In the first two years after the 2000 census, the growth was less than 1.4 percent. When the U.S. Census Bureau released the 2003 population estimates for cities and towns last week, the numbers showed an actual decline (albe...

Finding pride in adversityBy Phillip W. Lamb editor@couriernews.com A warning bell rings, pneumatic switches are thrown, and cylinders on the press begin to roll. That's when the real noise begins. By the time a Goss Urbanite press is up to speed, a person standing eight feet away can feel the rumbling in the soles of his feet. If that person is a longtime newspaperman, the rumbling reaches all the way into the heart, carried there by the printer's ink that we like to ...

Movie fare rising a bitBy Phillip W. Lamb editor@couriernews.com It doesn't seem so long ago that the comment, "I don't know, what do you want to do?" would be followed by a futile search of the movie listings, then a return to the endless cycle of what-to-do questions. Maybe it was 15 to 18 years ago, back when the kids were younger. I can clearly remember being frustrated with the choices available at the movie theaters where we lived then, because it seemed there...

State plays role in bookIf anyone asked Bill Clinton over the last two or three years how the writing of his memoirs was coming, he'd exult and say "great." Reports were that frequently he'd call people and read his just-completed passages proudly, asking the ever-leading question, "Isn't that good?" People who have written books, especially autobiographies, can tell you that Clinton's buoyancy was not a positive sign. They can tell you that it probably indicated he ...

High Court finally blinksIn the 19-month-long stare-down over school funding, consolidation and the constitution, it was the Arkansas Supreme Court that finally blinked. The 4-3 decision announced Friday was hailed by some as a victory for the separation of powers, but in fact it is an unconditional surrender of power by the court. By abandoning the case, the court turned interpretation of the state constitution over to the legislative branch, which has shown for 130 ...

Baptists, stay in schoolsBy Phillip W. Lamb editor@couriernews.com Delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention took an important step in the final day of their meeting this week by turning back a proposal to call for Baptist parents to pull their children out of public schools. By rejecting this idea, they affirmed the importance of a free public education and recognized the role of parents in making the decisions about their children's education. The two key propone...

Congrats, Corliss; you earned itBy Sean Ingram judicial@couriernews.com A decade ago, it was hard to find an Arkansan who wasn't still in Hog Heaven after the University of Arkansas Razorbacks - including Russellville native Corliss Williamson - beat the Duke Blue Devils to win the 1994 NCAA National Championship. Has it really been 10 years? No matter, because Tuesday night, the Big Nasty became a champion once again as the Detroit Pistons claimed the NBA championship by ma...

BMI report benefits allWhen the Arkansas Legislature approved the measure requiring schools to record and report a measure of obesity of schoolchildren in the state, we were skeptical about whether parents really needed someone else to tell them their children were on the hefty side. We're still skeptical about that, but the law of unintendended consequences has finally produced one of its rare positive results. The data gathered by schools have proven beneficial no...

Clinton critic now reticentCount Cliff Jackson out of the hordes that will view a documentary that purports to chronicle a vast right-wing conspiracy to keep, or kick, Bill Clinton out of the White House. The Hot Springs lawyer who was one of the first of Clinton's antagonists to go public with allegations about Clinton's sexual past shrank repentingly from the limelight years ago and now says he doesn't care to be associated with either extreme - Clinton bashing or Cli...

Tortured logic falters"Situational ethics" was a bad-boy buzz phrase a few years back. It refers to the idea that ethical behavior depends on the situation and that there are no absolute values that must be followed. This idea, and the liberals and moderates accused of espousing it, were all pretty much tarred and feathered years ago. Now the idea has cropped up again, and in the unlikeliest of places. Some person or persons in the Bush administration have breathed...

Go beyond the gray boxMany Russellville residents are happy about Wal-Mart's plans for building a 203,000-square-foot Supercenter at East Main Street and Weir Road. We'd be even happier to see city officials urge the retailing giant to go beyond its standard blue-and-gray box. You've seen those behemoths elsewhere in Arkansas, such as in Conway and the slightly smaller behemoth Supercenter that opened last year in Clarksville. They're unmistakably Wal-Marts, all ri...

Stamp out park smokeThere was once a time when cigarette smoke was everywhere. The "smoke-filled room" of political lore was just another spot where smoke was a common haze that filled the area. Offices, workplaces, theaters, even meetings of the board of trustees out at Arkansas Tech were still filled with ashtrays, cigarette butts and smoke for decades after the Surgeon General's warning about the dangers of smoking. For decades, non-smokers just accepted the i...

Old fears prove unfoundedBy Phillip W. Lamb editor@couriernews.com Newspaper opinion writers have a natural aversion against admitting a mistake, so readers should enjoy the rare occasions when one of us makes such a concession. It is with an unusual sort of satisfaction that I concede to being wrong about Ronald Reagan. Back in my early days, when Reagan was just an ex-governor and an ex-movie actor, I had some heartfelt concerns about where this man might take us as...

Schools set for changesSchool's out, but superintendents Roger Oge and Jerry Moore were hard at work Friday preparing their districts for changes to come. Both gave their full attention to the task at hand: combining budgets, planning salaries, personnel policies, bus routes - the mechanics of merging their districts with larger ones for the fall. But in the back of Moore's mind is the hope that a lawsuit that his Sparkman district joined will make it all for nothin...